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Our second Islandora event for 2020 will take Islandora home to where it was born: The University of Prince Edward Island, in beautiful Charlottetown PE. Come join us to learn all about Islandora, network with your community, and maybe tack on a few days to explore one of Canada's most beautiful destinations.

The camp will run from July 20 - 22, following the usual Islandora Camp format with one day of general sessions, a day of hands-on training workshops with tracks for front-end users and developers, and a day of sessions from the community. We hope to see you there!

The Islandora Foundation could not be more happy to welcome our newest member-supporter: The University of Nevada, Las Vegas. One of the earliest adopters of Islandora 8, and a vital supporter who helped to built the platform they are moving to, UNLV has made a huge impact on the Islandora community since they first engaged in 2018.

We hope you will attend later this month on January 21 when UNLV joins our webinar series to give you a tour of the amazing things they're doing with Islandora 8. Register now for free.

We're gearing up for the second release of Islandora 8, which boasts a bevy of new community requested and developed features:

Paged Content

IIIF Manifests

Multi-Page Openseadragon

Drag-and-drop re-ordering

Full text extraction for Images and PDFs

Technical metadata extraction using FITS

OAI-PMH endpoint

Versioning

Drupal revisions generate Fedora versions

Better Documentation

That's a lot of community contributions! And that means we need a lot of testing for all those new features, too. We'll be freezing the code and holding a two-week testing sprint from January 27th to February 7th to make sure everything is good to go for the next release. So if you're interested in getting your hands on the latest Islandora 8 and don't mind providing us with valuable feedback, please consider signing up to be a tester. You can find the sign up sheet here. Commitment is minimal. We have a spreadsheet of test cases where you can put your name down for as much or as little as you like. Just run through the test cases you like and let us know if it worked for you or not. Plus, there will be plenty of people around on Slack or the mailing list to help out if you get stuck or have any questions. We hope to see you there!

Islandora 8 was released last June without built-in support for paged content. Our community placed a very high priority on correcting that omission and getting books and newspapers ready for migration from collections in islandora 7. Thanks to an incredibly successful community sprint back in September, paged content is in! You can find it now in the latest code in our GitHub (or the latest build with our ansible playbook), in our documentation, and it will be a big part of our next Islandora 8 release, coming in early 2020.

Our February webinar will explain and demonstrate into how paged content and complex objects are supported in Islandora 8, including integration with IIIF, easy drag & drop interfaces for page order, and multiple viewer options. We will also review versioning support, which will be coming out in the same release.

Thanks again to everyone involved for another successful community sprint. During those two weeks, we reviewed all of our existing documentation and added quite a few new pages to support the new features we've picked up since 1.0.0 was released. You can see it all at islandora.github.io/documentation.

Updated Documentation

Summary

User Documentation

Nodes

Media

Make an Image

Collections

Metadata

Content Types

Blocks

Usage Stats

Developer Documentation

Installing Modules

Version Policy

REST Documentation

GET

POST / PUT

Migration

CSV

Contributing

How to Contribute

Committers

New Documentation

Paged Content

IIIF

OAI-PMH

Installing Features in Karaf

Creating Resource Nodes

Glossary

Extending Islandora

Versioning

Manual Install Docs

One particularly awesome contribution that we received during the Sprint was manual install docs from Daniel Aitken at discoverygarden. It is the last remaining unmerged piece of the sprint, which is unfortunate because we'd really love to have these docs. If anyone out there has the time to follow all the steps and build a box by hand, we'd really love to have your feedback so we can publish these as soon as possible.

Continuous Integration

We've integrated our documentation workflow using TravisCI and are now deploying the documentation to https://islandora.github.com/documentation every time mardown is merged into master. This means we'll always have up to date documentation available for the latest features!

Contributors

We at the Islandora Foundation would like to sincerely thank everyone who participated during the sprint. Because of continuing contributions like yours, we can continue to provide high quality free and open source software.

We will be kicking off 2020 with another Islandora 8 webinar showcasing a pilot site. One of the earliest adopters of Islandora 8, and an integral part of its development so far, the University of Nevada Las Vegas will join us on January 21, 2020 to showcase the results of their migration. They will discuss why they chose to go with Islandora 8 back in early 2018, what they have learned so far, and what's coming next for UNLV.

We're taking another look back at Islandoracon this week, to highlight another one of the amazing projects that came from our Islandora 8 Use-a-Thon. We've seen how to build exhibits and how to generate audio thumbnails; now, let's dive into the deep end of Drupal contributed modules with team Blue Lobster's recipe to integrate Islandora with Amazon Alexa. You can see the pitch on these clever slides, but the basic premise is that since Islandora 8 plays nicely with pretty much any Drupal contributed module, even boundary-pushing tools like Alexa integration are on the table. The use case for the team was to use Alexa to create interactive exhibits that pull information from similar collection across multiple institutions (it turned out that both team members' home institutions have collections centered around the experiences of African American nurses), but the true applications of this recipe are as varied as its components. Potentially, you could use this recipe to build an Islandora integration that can:

Send Citations, metadata, whatever we want to the user if they have set up their email

Creating a collaborative exhibit

Play audio and video objects and read transcripts

Respond to user search queries (like how many objects match the subject in the repositories)

Answer specific questions about the object (“Invocation Name, when was this recorded?”)

Interact with other applications or modules (got a print ordering system? Want to add event calendar items to your exhibit?)

Be accessed via web page, Alexa device, or phone app

Many thanks to Brad Spry (UNCC) and Mariee Vibbert (Case Western) for this innovative idea.

Doing something great with Islandora and/or Fedora that you want to share with the community? Have a recent project that the world just needs to know about? Send us your proposals to present at the joint Islandora and Fedora Camp in Arizona! Presentations should be roughly 20-25 minutes in length (with time after for questions) and deal with Islandora and/or Fedora in some way. The camp will be focussed on the latest versions of Islandora and Fedora, so preference will be given to sessions that relate to Islandora 8 and Fedora 4 and higher, but we still welcome proposals relating to earlier versions.

All we need is a session title and a brief abstract. Submit your proposal here.

The first Islandora event of 2020 will also be our first joint event with Fedora! From February 24 - 26, we will be partnering with LYRASIS and hosted by Arizona State University to bring you a three day camp packed with the latest in both Islandora and Fedora. Registration is now open!

Our focus will be on the latest versions of each, so this is an excellent opportunity to learn all about Islandora 8 and get some hands-on experience. The camp will be led by a group of experienced instructors with expertise spanning the front-end and code base of both platforms:

Melissa Anez has been working with Islandora since 2012 and has been the Community and Project Manager of the Islandora Foundation since it was founded in 2013. She has been a frequent instructor in the Admin Track and developed much of the curriculum, refining it with each new Camp. Lately she has been enjoying the challenge of fitting two versions of Islandora into a single day of workshops!

Danny Lamb has his B.Sc. in Mathematics and has been programming since before he could drive. He is currently serving as the Islandora Foundation's Technical Lead, and hopes to promote a collaborative and respectful environment where constructive criticism is encourage and accepted. He is married with two children, and lives on beautiful Prince Edward Island, Canada. If he had free time, he'd be spending it in front of his kamado style grill.

Bethany Seeger is a software developer in the library at Amherst College, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She’s a Fedora committer, and also is the lead committer and release manager of the ISLandora Enterprise (ISLE) project. She was an instructor at Fedora Camp in Austin, TX, and co-led the ISLE workshop at Islandoracon 2019. Bethany has lurked in the Islandora community for a while watching Islandora 8 develop; during this time, she’s installed Islandora 7 (manually, and then using ISLE) and Islandora 8 (using Ansible). Currently she is working on migrating a custom Fedora 3 repository to Islandora 7 (using ISLE) with the hopes of adopting Islandora 8 in the very near future. Bethany enjoys explaining complicated processes in plain English.

Seth Shaw jumped directly into developing with Islandora 8, and became a committer in 2018. He developed the Controlled Access Terms module and an ArchivesSpace integration module. He has been teaching workshops for over a decade but this will be his first Islandora Camp. His day job is as an Application Developer for Special Collections at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

David Wilcox is the Product Manager for Fedora at LYRASIS. He has been working with the Fedora and Islandora communities since 2011. David organizes camps and workshops for Fedora, where he is also frequently an instructor. The Arizona camp will be the first to feature both Fedora and Islandora, and he is excited for the opportunity to bring this new, combined camp to the community.

It's time to take a look at another awesome outcome from our Islandoracon Use-a-Thon: Waveform thumbnails for audio files, a handy addition to audio support in Islandora 8 that has the distinction of having become a standard part of the stack since the Use-a-Thon.

The idea came about from a collaboration between Renee Chalut from Vancouver Public Library and Jonathan Hunt from Catalyst. Renee shared a VPL collection of audio files that looks a little uniform, as the thumbnails were all the same:

FFmpeg to the rescue! FFmpeg is quite capable of using the waveform of an audio file to generate an image. With a few tweaks to Homarus to allow PNG thumbnails and generate the png, Islandora 8 can present distinct thumbnails for audio that actually reflect the content of the resource node:

This is such a simple, but useful tweak that this pull request has made it standard in Islandora 8. Work continues to expand this tool to generate animated gifs as thumbnails (an improvement that could have application for video as well).